It is not anti-science. I think, uh, one of the things that I'm most proud of is the release of a new report a couple weeks ago called Science, a new golden age. Um, and I think anyone who reads that report, I think what try what we will most likely see is an administration that deeply cares about the American science and technology enterprise.

Sets the administration's official self-narrative on science at the outset, against a Nature poll showing 86% of scientists backed Harris.

I think over the last, you know, 15 or 20 years, I think science has been deeply and deeply politicized. And we no longer are asking sort of the very hard and important questions of, you know, what is a scientific method? How should we be approaching it? Should we be questioning um, you know, some of these conclusions uh, and rather uh, you know, I think it's been dominated by kind of this this dogma. And I think it really crescendoed and peaked in in COVID where um suddenly, you know, there was a certain individual that if you didn't agree with what he said, then suddenly you were anti-science.

Articulates the administration's core critique of recent scientific institutions — that consensus became dogma — which underpins its funding overhaul.

Right now if you talk to sort of your your your median lobbyists for the science community, the only thing that they are fixated on is singularly is the research and development budget. If the number doesn't go up, then they haven't done their job and they haven't quote unquote supported science. And to me, that's a question. But the more important question that every scientist should be asking is, is the way that the US government spends at $200 billion in S&T funding every year, is it actually driving the best breakthroughs and biggest breakthroughs of the American people?

Reframes the science-funding debate from 'how much' to 'how well,' challenging the dominant political logic of science advocacy.

Senator Ted Cruz and the committee on uh at on in the Senate did did an analysis of the grants that were given during the Biden administration and they found that roughly one quarter or 25% of grants at NSF during that time period went towards DEI related quote unquote science. And if you think about that, that's an astronomical amount. That is roughly $2 billion a year times four years. That's $8 billion of science funding that went to these DI related initiatives. And that isn't science and that shouldn't be.

This is the administration's primary public justification for terminated NSF grants, and its accuracy and methodology are heavily contested.

The thing that is not true and what the data does not support is that it is a climate emergency. And I think one of the best examples of that is is what's happened with these um these the RCP 8.5 they call it. So these are scenarios that that climate scientists um try to estimate kind of the impact of this quote unquote climate change will have on on on the world. And this was the most extreme um scenario that had been in um in numerous national climate assessments and run by the IPCC as well. And ultimately they determined a few months ago that um they could not with any scientific integrity substantiate continuing to have this scenario play out.

Illustrates how the administration distinguishes between accepted climate science and specific modeling scenarios to justify redirecting research funding.

1998 14 billion 2003 27 billion 2024 47 billion so the budget has more than tripled since 1998 but there has not been a proportional rise in breakthrough treatments coming out of that funding arguably people call it heir's law it's like Moore's law in reversed it's fallen roughly 80fold since 1950 50 in terms of outcomes per dollar spent. Uh and it habs every 9 years. So every 9 years we get half as efficient as we were at getting a return on the investment we're making.

Presents the empirical case for scientific stagnation in the US — the core problem the 'New Golden Age' report is designed to address.

I think broadly the issue is we have not been innovative in any way on the way that we actually conduct the science the you know whether it's at NIH or at NSF or at any of our other science agencies the answer has always been let's just keep doing the same thing but add more money and hope that we get more outcomes proportion rather than asking the harder questions about are there other ways that we could be conducting the science, are there other types of scientists that could be getting the funding, could be getting the money, are there other institutions that could be getting the funding?

Identifies institutional inertia — not just money levels — as the root cause of declining research productivity.

One one thing that that we're going to be testing at at National Science Foundation is a concept called golden tickets where each of the evaluators are going to be given one or two or three golden tickets. And this was um initially actually tested in Denmark and some other places. And the theory is that you know the the um reviewer will then be able to unilaterally without the rest of the of the committee agreeing can make a selection of of a particular grant. So, you incentivize folks to to have more um more interesting grants.

Introduces a concrete, experimentally-tested reform to peer review designed to fund high-risk, unconventional research.

In venture capital, which you and I know well, you're going to have one out of 10 things work. It's a power law. That thing's worth 100x. And you want to have nine out of 10 failures because that means you're taking a lot of risk. That's really how you push the envelope and discover new things and make big breakthroughs is you got to take risk, which means failure.

Proposes importing venture capital's power-law logic directly into government science funding — a provocative and debated idea.

If you kind of rewind history back in in 1945, uh World War II was ending. Vanver Bush who was sort of the science adviser had my role for for FDR received a letter from the president that asked him you know what do we do with the science enterprise post World War II and Vanver Bush wrote his response that became science endless frontier which is kind of the the seinal work in the way that the US government should interface with science community... And the question now is is that model that that Bush pushed forward and and and promulgated and actually led to the the great discoveries of the last 50 years, is that still as relevant today as it was then? And our answer is it's not and we need a refresh.

Places the current reform effort in historical context, arguing that the 80-year-old Vannevar Bush framework is overdue for a fundamental rethink.

What has happened over the last 70 years was there's been this dramatic shift. Now roughly 70% of R&D is done by by the private sector and 30 is funded by the federal government... And the question now is is that model that that Bush pushed forward... is that still as relevant today as it was then? And our answer is it's not and we need a refresh. And that is why you wrote we wrote new golden age. And for us the first basic question we always ask ourselves is is the government spending on something that the private sector or others in the community like philanthropy are not incentivized to do.

Articulates the guiding principle for deciding what government should fund: fill the gaps private capital won't touch.

The alternative to an extreme is kind of what what uh what the PRC or what China is doing. And there you have sort of a a top-down directed um sort of single agency entity that that sets priorities and tries to execute. um they have been trying to essentially figure out how to do EUV lithography since since we put the export controls in 2019. No breakthrough has happened. There's nothing more important to their economy than solving that scientific problem and haven't been able to do that. So to me I feel like one of the most special features about our system is we do have people competing. This sort of free market approach to innovation is a is a huge feature of our ecosystem.

Uses China's failure on EUV lithography to argue that decentralized, competitive research systems outperform top-down directed ones.

I think I think the Chinese realized a few like years ago that technological and scientific leadership is the most important foundational block to economic and national security. Everything that everything that we do as a country is sort of at some in some way in my opinion rooted in scientific and technological discovery. Um we see it with what's going on in semiconductors today. The breakthroughs that that we had in transformers and other technology led to the large language models of today. literally everything that's sort of powering our economy at its core was some sort of scientific discovery.

Frames the US-China science race as fundamentally a competition for economic and national security supremacy, not just academic prestige.

A statistic that I I've tracked for a long time is is sort of the the percentage of USborn, you know, PhD recipients in computer science, for example. If you if you rewind the clock, you know, 30 years, I think it was, you know, 70% were American and 30% were were foreign. And now it's now it's inverted. Um, and I think to us as a country, you know, I believe that having a a a a STEM literate workforce is one of the most important superpowers we could have as a country.

The inversion of domestic vs. foreign PhD recipients in STEM is a concrete data point about America's homegrown talent pipeline crisis.

We used to have programs at National Science Foundation that would actually um support and encourage gifted and talented students in American high schools and middle schools. Um those were stopped for some reason. Encouraging high-erforming young students to pursue STEM in America was something that an actual decision was made of the government to to no longer fund that.

Reveals a specific and largely unreported policy reversal — defunding gifted STEM programs — that Kratsios links to DEI priorities crowding out merit-based advancement.

I I really do often times think about kind of what happened during COVID and and kind of what what Fouchy represented. And I think, you know, he did more disservice to science than than anyone in in modern history. you know, when he is advocating for positions like, you know, students need to be masked in schools, when um societies, you know, you know, the pediatric societies are putting out letters saying, you know, um it's okay for people to go out um and and uh collectively protest, but they're not allowed to, you know, go see their dying grandmother in a hospital. you know, no regular median American can listen to that and and then take science seriously.

Delivers the administration's sharpest indictment of COVID-era science communication as self-defeating and trust-destroying.

What was scary to me was how so many people without empiricism, the whole fundamental basis of science is you gather empirical data. You ask questions, you inquire, and then you go gather data and you use that data to inform your conclusion. And there wasn't a lot of empirical data that was being used to make conclusions. And everyone lined up behind these conclusions and these assumptions and it was told trust the science. And as a result, not only did it kind of destroy trust in science, but I think it brings to light questions. What happened to the scientists? Why did they all kind of line up like this? And why did everyone feel it was okay to put down people that asked questions when the basis of science is to ask questions?

Pinpoints the specific mechanism by which COVID eroded scientific credibility — enforced consensus that suppressed empirical questioning.

One of the statistics which was most alarming for me which uh which Jay the Jay Baracharia the director of NIH shared with me was that the median age of an intramural researcher at NIH is 71 years old.

A single striking data point — median NIH intramural researcher age of 71 — illustrates a deep generational pipeline failure in American science.

The idea in in science may be the same, which is you find great people. Yes. You give them significant funding. You let them decide how to spend the money rather than have some overlord that scrutinizes every dollar they're spending and every action they're taking. Gets out of their way and says, 'I trust that you're going to get somewhere. Here's a whole bunch of money, a lot more than you're asking for. Here's a whole lot of time. See you in 10 years. You'll figure something amazing out.'

Proposes a radical shift from project-based to person-based funding, a model championed by organizations like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

I think too and I again to keep harping on it. I mean honestly the the core tenant of new golden age is about thinking about how we can elevate the scientist again how the way that we fund our programs, the types of programs we do fund, the way that we structure our grants and fellowships are all centered around the scientist himself. It's not about what institution you work at or where you came from or where you grew up. It's about you yourself. Can you pursue sort of gold standard scientific work and we'll we'll support.

Crystallizes the 'New Golden Age' philosophy as scientist-first rather than institution-first — a genuine structural departure if implemented.

That is where we want to essentially double the scientific output of the United States by applying AI to our hardest scientific challenges and endeavors. We fundamentally believe that AI is going to be the biggest unlock to scientific discovery in the history of the world. Whether you're in material science, whether you're in chemistry, whether you're in math, whether you're in physics, you know, applying AI to your discipline is going to fundamentally change the way that you can do your science and accelerate the way that it's done.

The 'Genesis mission' — using AI to double US scientific output — is the administration's most ambitious and verifiable science claim.